SPLEEN is the personal blog of Stephen Judd

Happiness through collective noise

A couple of years ago I read a review of Barbara Ehrenreich's book, as summarised here, that in recent centuries we have lost many former sources of collective fun and that this has caused a dramatic rise in depression. The article I link to doesn't establish these claims very solidly: do we really do less together, and are we really sadder, and is there really a causal connection? I need to read her book at the very least before I call myself convinced, but I find the claim very appealing.

...if we are looking for a common source of depression on the one hand, and the suppression of festivities on the other, it is not hard to find. Urbanisation and the rise of a competitive, market-based economy favoured a more anxious and isolated sort of person - potentially both prone to depression and distrustful of communal pleasures. Calvinism provided a transcendent rationale for this shift, intensifying the isolation and practically institutionalising depression as a stage in the quest for salvation. At the level of "deep, underlying psychological change", both depression and the destruction of festivities could be described as seemingly inevitable consequences of the broad process known as modernisation. But could there also be a more straightforward link, a way in which the death of carnival contributed directly to the epidemic of depression?

It may be that in abandoning their traditional festivities, people lost a potentially effective cure for it. Burton suggested many cures for melancholy - study and exercise, for example - but he returned again and again to the same prescription: "Let them use hunting, sports, plays, jests, merry company ... a cup of good drink now and then, hear musick, and have such companions with whom they are especially delighted; merry tales or toys, drinking, singing, dancing, and whatsoever else may procure mirth." He acknowledged the ongoing attack on "Dancing, Singing, Masking, Mumming, Stage-plays" by "some severe Gatos," referring to the Calvinists, but heartily endorsed the traditional forms of festivity: "Let them freely feast, sing and dance, have their Puppet-plays, Hobby-horses, Tabers, Crowds, Bagpipes, &c, play at Ball, and Barley-breaks, and what sports and recreations they like best." In his ideal world, "none shall be over-tired, but have their set times of recreations and holidays, to indulge their humour, feasts and merry meetings ..." His views accorded with treatments of melancholy already in use in the 16th century. While the disruptively "mad" were confined and cruelly treated, melancholics were, at least in theory, to be "refreshed & comforted" and "gladded with instruments of musick".

There's another long piece I read at about the same time, which I just cannot find, which also dealt with the positive effects of collective ritual actions, especially those associated with music or rhythmic chanting.

For one reason or another I've had a lot on my mind the past few weeks. And two things have really cheered me up. One, rehearsing with the Wellington Batucada, which is a giant noise machine where you get to repeat your musical pattern in a meditative way, and feel it tie in with other people's rhythms. Two, a really great performance by Brazealand on Saturday, with a lot of dancing and enthusiasm and glee.

Perhaps it isn't universally rewarding to play and cavort and keep time with other people. But it sure is for me.

I think one of the saddest things about music in the 20th century is how we mostly became consumers of a highly refined art which few of us could produce ourselves. In this century the techniques and equipment for electronic music are becoming easy and affordable, but I also sense, with the vogue for ukuleles and improvised percussion, that we might have an upwelling of desire to make and to hear more primitive sounds with things we can touch and manipulate directly. In which case, if Ehrenreich is right, we can await the great 21st Century cheerfulness. I certainly hope so.

What I mainly got out of the Ehrenreich article was: if you want to be happy, it helps to be shallow. I'm a surprisingly shallow person, so it would explain why I've never had any particular problems with depression.

Well, it's one interpretation. I do think she has a point, insofar as several of the dominant Western modes of thought have deliberately focussed on isolation and have actively encouraged depression. I'd say that the connection to public celebrations is a secondary effect: the main thing, I think, is the deliberate increasing of social isolation (originally a function of religion, latterly an inadvertant result of consumer-based capitalism) is probably more to blame, with the lack of public celebrations more of a side effect.

Two things that kept our society singing were the piano and the church, often together. I don’t see many reasons to mourn the demise of organised religion, but the loss of an opportunity for song, unjudged on your ability to hold tune, is one of them.